Informed Speculation

That’s the question Heather MacDonald poses regarding the NY Times and its seemingly unending desire to unmask every secret program the U.S. has in its arsenal against terrorism:

BY NOW IT’S UNDENIABLE: The New York Times is a national security threat. So drunk is it on its own power and so antagonistic to the Bush administration that it will expose every classified antiterror program it finds out about, no matter how legal the program, how carefully crafted to safeguard civil liberties, or how vital to protecting American lives.

The headline was grim: the U.S. siphoning through bank records willy-nilly; the reality is that a very useful program has had its cover blown, despite numerous safeguards:

The procedure for obtaining that information could not be more solicitous of privacy and the rule of law: Agents are only allowed to seek information based on intelligence tying specific individuals to al Qaeda; they must document the intelligence behind every search request and maintain an electronic record of every search; and, in an inspired civil liberties innovation that would undoubtedly garner kudos from the Times had a Democratic administration devised it, a board of independent auditors from banks reviews the subpoena requests to make sure that only terror suspects’ transactions are traced. Any use of the data for criminal investigations into drug trafficking, say, or tax fraud is banned.

Indeed, it seems that Eric Lichtblau and James Risen will stop at nothing to attack this administration, and the Times has no intention of reining them in, as today’s sanctimonious editorial confirms:

After the attacks on 9/11, when the terrorist threat seemed equally dangerous and amorphous, one of the few clear strategies for counterattack was to follow the money. Almost everyone, including this page, urged the Bush administration to be aggressive in shutting down the flow of cash to terrorist organizations, and to root out the people who were supplying it.

The administration went to work, and one very useful source of information turned out to be a banking cooperative known as Swift — Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication. It routes about $6 trillion a day among 7,800 financial institutions worldwide. An article by Eric Lichtblau and James Risen in yesterday’s Times — and similar stories in The Wall Street Journal and The Los Angeles Times — detailed how investigators have made use of Swift data to track potential terrorist financing. Government officials say the information has helped capture one important Al Qaeda operative abroad, and that it has assisted domestic investigations as well.

That sounds like good news. What’s worrisome is a familiar refrain. Despite a compliant Congress, which was eager to give the administration all the investigative tools it requested, the White House has chosen to operate outside any real scrutiny, and not to seek explicit authorization for what has clearly become a permanent program.

In the heightened state of emergency after 9/11, the government began examining the Swift records with the help of general administrative subpoenas, which are basically permission from one part of the executive branch to another. Now it is nearly five years later, and nothing has changed. Investigators have examined the international money transfers of thousands of Americans, apparently without ever trying to get a court order or warrant to do the searches. And Congress, as usual, has never exercised any oversight.

A few members were briefed on the program, and a few more told about it once it became clear that newspapers were preparing an article. But the briefings tend to become a trap in which those who are informed about what is going on are required under security rules not to talk about what they know even after it becomes public. Armed with some knowledge, they become more impotent than when they were completely in the dark.

One danger of a never-ending government investigation into people’s financial transactions is mission creep. A Treasury Department spokesman told The Times that the information mined from Swift — which includes millions of records — cannot be used for anything except terrorism searches. But there is little to guarantee that will continue to be the case.

If you can read that and find any good reason for the Times to blow the lid, you’re amazingly adept at reading between the lines. If the Times has more than a few dozen Republican subscribers by now, I would be well and truly shocked…

UPDATE 12:44 p.m.: Rereading this, I really think I have understated how good the MacDonald piece is – and how infuriating the Times‘ actions are:

A coterie of former and current Democratic and Republican leaders also begged the Times not to jeopardize this highly successful counterterrorism program, but the Times knew better. In a smug prepared statement, executive editor Bill Keller emotes: “We remain convinced that the administration’s extraordinary access to this vast repository of international financial data, however carefully targeted use of it may be, is a matter of public interest.”

Now that the Times has blown the cover on this terror-tracking initiative, sophisticated terrorists will figure out how to evade it, according to the Treasury’s top counterterrorism official, Stuart Levey, speaking to the Wall Street Journal. The lifeblood of international terrorism–cash–will once again flow undetected.

The bottom line is this: No classified secret necessary to fight terrorism is safe once the Times hears of it, at least as long as the Bush administration is in power. The Times justifies its national security breaches by the mere hypothetical possibility of abuse–without providing any evidence that this financial tracking program, or any other classified antiterror initiative that it has revealed, actually has been abused. To the contrary, the paper reports that one employee was taken off the Swift program for conducting a search that did not obviously fall within the guidelines.

I have stated before that the legality of the NSA eavesdropping program is questionable and that I welcome the lawsuits against it as they will help to remove the cloud of doubt surrounding it – but no one is questioning the legality of this program, and no one is accusing anyone of abusing it.

This is truly outrageous – and I’ve learned to use the word sparingly. The New York Times has no business endangering my welfare – or yours.  My sincere wish is that Bill Keller and Pinch get what they justly deserve – bankruptcy, for shredding the reputation of one of the most respected news organizations in the world…